ABSTRACT
The acquisition of grammatical relations (GRs) is central to the study of language acquisition. Perhaps the major impediment to our theoretical attempts to explain how children acquire GRs has been the cross-linguistic variability of the GRs themselves. This is a problem for theory building, but not necessarily for the child acquiring a first language. The primary goal of this chapter is to set out some observations concerning just what children find difficult and what they find easy when they acquire case and agreement systems, those systems most intimately related to GRs. The plan of this chapter is to outline two opposing theoretical approaches to the acquisition of GRs, and to synthesize a cross-linguistic review of data from four languages that will help us better understand just what is and is not difficult in the process of acquiring GRs.
